Mastercard Buys Startup That Will Help You Manage Pesky Subscriptions

Does this sound like the life you subscribe to?

In a single day, a hypothetical person could wake up, brew some coffee delivered by MistoBox, read The Wall Street Journal, work out at their local GoodLife Fitness while listening to a Spotify playlist, use a transit app to catch the train to work, eat lunch and dinner prepared with produce from a Farmer Jones Farm box, clear their head with The Mindfulness App, and then relax in the evening with a movie on Netflix and a glass of natural cinsault delivered by MYSA Natural Wine before heading to bed with the help of the SleepWatch Premium app.

Each of these actions shares a common denominator: a paid subscription. Mastercard, naturally, sees this (semi-)fictional day plan as a business opportunity. The card payments giant announced Tuesday that it’s acquiring Minna Technologies, a startup that specializes in letting bank and card customers manage (and cancel) subscription services.

It’s an App, App, App, App World

Subscription payments will bring firms a combined $600 billion in revenue from 6.8 billion subscriptions this year, and that will rise to $1 trillion in revenue and 9.3 billion subscriptions by 2028, according to Juniper Research. Most of that money comes from happy customers, but surely you’ve — at least once — smacked yourself on the head when you were dinged with a $49.99 charge after forgetting to cancel a 30-day free trial.

A foothold in helping consumers manage this sometimes cumbersome aspect of life planning is in line with Mastercard’s recent strategic moves:

• Along with rival Visa, Mastercard is trying to diversify beyond card and payment services. Mastercard recently expanded its growing cybersecurity repertoire, while Visa expanded deeper into fraud prevention.
• Sweden-based Minna — which develops tech that lets a user view and manage their paid subscriptions within their existing bank app or website, regardless of payment method — gives Mastercard a foothold in an obvious, adjacent, and expanding market.

Fine Print: How much did Mastercard fork over for this new tech? It didn’t disclose, making the info harder to find than the terms and conditions buried in the deepest, darkest corners of some subscription app menus.